Design for the subconscious
Using a theory of the subconscious to create powerful connections between products and users
The psychoanalytic theory of the subconscious has been around for more than a century. It has had a major influence on art, cinema, and social sciences. What about design? Can our understanding of the subconscious help design better user experiences? This is what I’m investigating in this article.
What is the subconscious?
Before we talk about design, it’s necessary to define what the subconscious is. Put simply, the subconscious refers to the part of the mind and personality that a person is not aware of. This idea was originally developed by Sigmund Freud and he argued that the subconscious part of the human mind consisted of various repressed, animalistic, and sexual urges that society deemed unacceptable or inappropriate. It can be argued that the subconscious also contains things that we forget because thoughts cannot simply disappear, they just go into the subconscious. It is now a widely held belief that the subconscious mind affects people’s thinking and behavior. Freud was the first person to formulate this concept, but one of Freud’s students didn’t entirely agree with his take on the subconscious.
The student’s name was Carl Jung, and he saw the subconscious as something more than just a collection of repressed urges. He argued against using the term “subconscious” because “sub” means it’s somehow inferior to the conscious mind. Jung argued that the subconscious mind was anything but inferior and preferred the term unconscious mind. To avoid confusion that is how I will refer to it in the article from now on. Jung further developed the idea of the unconscious and divided it into “personal unconscious” and “collective unconscious”, which I will talk about in the next.
The collective unconscious
The collective unconscious became one of the most important concepts in Jungian psychology. He arrived at it by studying mystical and spiritual teachings of the East. During this process, he noticed a lot of similarities between his dreams and many of the symbols in Eastern philosophies and religions. Furthermore, he found these same themes echoed in the dreams of his patients. By studying ancient stories and myths of cultures around the world, he eventually discovered common patterns that appeared in all of them. This led Jung to formulate the idea of the collective unconscious as a deeper layer that extends beyond the personal unconscious of the individual.
Unlike the personal unconscious, which contains repressed contents of a singular individual, the collective unconscious includes memories, emotions, and behavioral patterns inherited from our ancestors. These are patterns that have been repeating for hundreds of thousands of years. According to Jung, they can be triggered under certain circumstances. In fact, all great artists know how to tap into the collective unconscious to create something that deeply affects people by activating these ancestral memories.
If you pay attention, all of the great works of art tap into some universal theme that we as humans share. For example, Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary holding the lifeless body of Jesus on her lap evokes a very powerful emotional response from people because a relationship between a mother and child is as old as mankind itself. Clearly, the unconscious plays a significant role in the process of artistic creation. What about design?
Unconscious design
Behind all the fancy visuals, at its core, design is about problem-solving. We also know that the unconscious is the part of the mind of a person that they aren’t aware of.
Here’s a question, is it possible that there are some problems that people cannot articulate because they are simply unaware of them? Could unconscious design solve problems that go unnoticed? Could designers be better equipped to solve problems if they learn about the way the unconscious functions?
Gaetano Pesce’s UP series
All of these things may seem very abstract for now, but perhaps an example will help. One of the best examples of design for the unconscious is Gaetano Pesce’s UP series. It’s a sofa that resembles the shape of a woman’s body and connects to a foot mat shaped like a ball. The sofa has been called “pregnant mom” or “mother’s embrace” for its unusual shape. It’s most likely referencing the shape of the statue titled Venus of Willendorf, which was found in Austria and is said to belong to the stone age.
This statue is one of the first expressions of western art, which means that the inspiration for it came directly from the unconscious of our ancestors. Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae describes this statue better than I ever could.
Bulging, bulbous, bubbling. Venus of Willendorf, bent over her own belly, tends the hot pot of nature. She is eternally pregnant. She broods, in all senses. She is hen, nest, egg. The Latin mater and materia, mother and matter, are etymologically connected. Venus of Willendorf is the nature-mother as primeval muck, oozing into infant forms.
The comfort and warmth of sitting in your mother’s embrace is something that we all share as species. These are shared in the form of both personal and collective memories of our ancestors. According to Jungian psychology, a primal behavior like that eventually becomes a pattern that we can recognize instantly. By using these patterns in his designs, Gaetano Pesce taps into the collective unconscious of people, and those who use the sofa experience the same feeling of warmth and comfort that they did when they were children. I would argue that this is the most powerful form of design because it creates a unique and precious connection between the user and the design.
How to design for the unconscious
Gaetano’s UP series sofas seem cool and all, but if you’re a designer you can’t rely on inspiration alone. We need a systematic way to approach unconscious design. Luckily, I have 2 useful frameworks that can help us with that. They can be used either in combination or separately. It’s up to you and the specific requirements of the project.
Framework 1: Seven fundamental motives
This one comes from evolutionary psychology. In an article published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology Vladas Griskevicius and Douglas Kenrick list 7 fundamental evolutionary motives that drive our behavior.
- Self-protection
- Disease avoidance
- Affiliation
- Status
- Mate acquisition
- Mate retention
- Kin care
The last motive on the list is kin care and if you’ve been paying attention, Gaetano Pesce makes heavy use of that motive in his UP series sofas. In a nutshell, by activating one or more of these motives, we’re tapping into the collective unconscious to create a deeper connection between our product and our users. In the same article, they also provide an incredibly useful table that lists cues that trigger said motives and the effects these motives have on a person’s behavior once they’re activated.
Let’s use the self-protection motive to illustrate how this framework can be used. Our ancestors had a much higher imperative to survive and evolved a self-protection system, which can still be activated in modern humans. When we see snakes, angry expressions, scary movies or we’re alone in the dark, our self-protection system activates. Once the protection system is active it can increase our loss aversion, tendency to conform, and decreased risk-seeking. In product design, activating people’s self-protection systems can make them desire products that offer extra safety over those that don’t. For example, choosing Volvo over Toyota. People are also more likely to pay more for extra safety features, like multiple airbags. I do not want to go over the rest of these motives, because it would simply be repeating the contents of the original article, but I highly recommend reading it for more examples.
Framework 2: Erik Erikson’s Stages of Life
Erik Erikson was a developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst. He was known for his theory on the psychological development of human beings. He divided human development into 8 stages:
- Infancy
- Toddlerhood
- Early childhood
- Middle childhood
- Adolescence
- Early adulthood
- Middle Adulthood
- Late Adulthood
In each stage, individuals are confronted with some kind of crisis that they must overcome to move forward successfully.
Above is a table that outlines the stage of life with the corresponding crisis. If the last framework was evolutionary, this one is psychoanalytic. I do not want to go deep into the theory behind it, because that’s outside of the scope of this article, but I will show you how this framework can be used. To begin, you need to identify the life stage of your primary user and then look at the life crisis corresponding to it. For example, let’s say we’re making a product for younger people, adolescence would be our stage. The crisis is identity and the existential question is, “Who am I?” If you look at the events column, it says social relationships. The event column is basically a major event in the life of a person in this stage. It makes sense that for young people it’s finding and fitting into a social group. So, having established these, we can tailor the copy, tone, visuals, or features towards addressing this issue. Our product needs to successfully communicate to our users that we can help them discover their identity and find their place in a social group.
You might ask, are these crises unconscious or conscious problems? I’ll answer by posing a question to you; Were you aware of these life crises before you learned about this framework? If the answer is no, then it is an unconscious problem for you. What about your users? Here’s what Jung wrote in The Undiscovered Self:
People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them.
This means that if it’s new to you, then it’s most likely new to your potential users too. Therefore, by addressing these issues, you’re directly communicating with their unconscious.
In a world oversaturated with polished designs driven by numbers that look and feel the same, people are craving authentic and meaningful experiences. Unconscious design can be one of the tools designers can utilize to deliver these experiences. As Gaetano Pesce says, “Design is a tool, not just to make nice things in a very decorative way. Design is much more complex than that. Design is a very powerful form of communication, a very important form of expression.”
P.S. Special thanks to my university professor and head of innovation at Hive, Gary van Broekhoven. Without his invaluable insights, this article wouldn’t have been possible.
